Backfires Updates

We appreciate your continued engagement with the community and feedback on the new platform updates that have been rolling out across Car and Driver.

We want to let you know of a few minor updates made yesterday in response to some of the feedback we've heard:

We've added a "View more posts" link to the bottom of the Recent Discussions section on the main landing page. Clicking this link will take you to a list of recent forum posts.

Raised the limit of replies to a comment to 25 before the "read more" link displays to expand the thread. While this should address most cases where this has been inconvenient, we will also be exploring a higher limit or removal of this constraint altogether.

Essentially lifted the limit of Comments Per Page, to reduce the amount of paging through shorter sets of comments. We will monitor this to make sure threads are still readable and easily navigated.

There are a few additional items we are looking into for upcoming releases. As always, your feedback is welcomed and helps us identify and prioritize updates to the platform.

I still want to know when and/or if we'll get back the ability to rearrange photo order in our photo albums. Having that and especially being able to put newer pictures first in a given album made (I think) a fair difference in how many people actually bothered to look at them.

Hi Christine, thanks for your feedback. We are trying to address as much feedback as possible from all the members who have been sending it. As you can imagine, we are hearing a lot of things that may not always be consistent with what other members feel.

Apologies for any disruption to the threads, but one of the main things we had heard was that there was too much "clicking to the next page" with the new platform, so we're trying to get it to a point that is suitable for everyone. This is a relatively easy configuration on our side, but as this change indicates, not an easy threshold to set to meet everyone's needs.

As far as the "zombie" posts, we have heard this as well, but have not been able to identify and replicate the issue on our side. If you could, please forward a link to these when you come across them. Even better, a screenshot would be very helpful so that we can see what you are seeing.

Thanks again for your feedback and continued engagement with Backfires!

Hi Christine, thanks for your feedback. We are trying to address as much feedback as possible from all the members who have been sending it. As you can imagine, we are hearing a lot of things that may not always be consistent with what other members feel.

Apologies for any disruption to the threads, but one of the main things we had heard was that there was too much "clicking to the next page" with the new platform, so we're trying to get it to a point that is suitable for everyone. This is a relatively easy configuration on our side, but as this change indicates, not an easy threshold to set to meet everyone's needs.

As far as the "zombie" posts, we have heard this as well, but have not been able to identify and replicate the issue on our side. If you could, please forward a link to these when you come across them. Even better, a screenshot would be very helpful so that we can see what you are seeing.

Thanks again for your feedback and continued engagement with Backfires!

-Chris

Hey Chris! No worries! I know it has to be a massive amount of things to get straightened out. I will be glad to try to capture the Zombie posts LOL when I come across them.I appreciate all of you at C&D! Thanks Chris

Thanks for pointing us to a specific zombie, maarp! This helped the team track down the issue, fix it, and we think we have eradicated the disease causing the rise of the zombies. As it turns out, the characterization was a really good one. Some older posts, when simply revisited by a member, would create a new permalink to that post and trigger an "update" for it to show up as having recent activity...essentially reanimating a post that had no life.

These actually look like legitimate posts with recent activity from active members, albeit the original posts are relatively old. The zombie posts would not have an active member comment listed recently enough to put it into the post. The issue we addressed was that older threads were being revived into the recent post list with no new comments being created.

These actually look like legitimate posts with recent activity from active members, albeit the original posts are relatively old. The zombie posts would not have an active member comment listed recently enough to put it into the post. The issue we addressed was that older threads were being revived into the recent post list with no new comments being created.

Please let me know if I'm misinterpreting these.

-Chris

Ok I understand! That was my original concern about old articles posting 5 years later. It seems members still want to read those so it's a win win!

It seems to be excessively complicated to put a picture into a post now. You upload it once to get into the "download library". But the picture never makes it to the post. So now you once again upload from the library to get it to the post. Also, once you make a post on a page, you can not do anything else until you completely refresh the page then hunt again for where you were.

Thanks Chris. You guys are the best. The other problem persists that if you make a post or response on a page, the page dies for anymore actions, whether it is upvoting, putting another post down or even clicking on a profile until you completely refresh the page and then search again to where ever you were.

Thanks Chris. You guys are the best. The other problem persists that if you make a post or response on a page, the page dies for anymore actions, whether it is upvoting, putting another post down or even clicking on a profile until you completely refresh the page and then search again to where ever you were.

Is that a new profile pic?

We're looking into the secondary issue you've reported. The team has a number of updates queued up. I just tested an improved image upload flow as well that I think will bring some happiness back to that task.

Same profile pic! I'd take a new one, but I ripped the air-damn off the front and need to have that bumper cover replaced/repainted.